On January 14th, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin published an article reflecting on his 2014 vision for blockchain: the idea was to have permissionless decentralized applications that could support functions such as finance, social media, ride-sharing, organizational governance, crowdfunding, and even potentially create a completely different alternative network, all built on a single technology. Over the past five years, this core vision has sometimes become blurred, and various "meta-narratives" and "themes" have at times dominated. But the core vision has never died. In fact, the core technologies supporting this vision are becoming increasingly powerful.
Vitalik stated that in 2014, decentralized applications were merely toys, hundreds of times more difficult to use in the Web 2.0 era than they are now. By 2026, Fileverse will be usable enough that I can frequently use it to write documents and send them to others for collaboration. The decentralized revival is coming, and you too can be a part of it.
